Ianto Jones looked at the snake, and the snake looked back at Ianto. Its jaw opened lazily, only twenty centimetres from his nose as he squatted. He could feel the tension in his haunches. He was going to have to stand up. Would that alarm the snake?
‘Oxyuranus microlepidotus,’ Jack told him.
Ianto didn’t look away from the reptile poised in front of his face. He said calmly: ‘You’re making that up.’
‘That’s an inland taipan,’ continued Jack, his voice low and dangerous. ‘One bite contains enough venom to kill a hundred men.’ He considered this for a moment. ‘l dated a girl like that.’
‘Well, some date you’ve turned out to be.’ Ianto tutted and stood up with a groan. He pushed against the glass that separated them from the snake. ‘All you want to do is talk about your former conquests, Jack.’
In the darkness of the reptile house’s observation deck, Jack sought out Ianto’s hand and squeezed it affectionately. ‘You’re a bit of a charmer yourself, Mr Jones.’
Ianto watched the taipan. It had already lost interest, and slithered its olive-green body to the other side of the glass exhibit space. ‘I didn’t charm him. Or maybe her.’
‘What d’ya expect?’ Jack grinned. ‘Staring out from a glass box for years on end. Who’d want that?’ He nodded at the exit. ‘C’mon, you can buy me an ice cream.’
They stepped out from the gloomy reptile house and into the cold, crisp, bright November air of Torlannau Zoo. The attraction had not long opened for the day, but already it was getting busy. Kids were chattering and screaming with delight at the antics of monkeys or horror at the smells of the hippos. Parents were already being pestered for ice creams. Zoo staff chaperoned and pointed, easily marked out in the growing crowds by their brightly coloured uniforms.
Ianto said, ‘We keep Janet in a glass box. Down in the cells.’
‘Never had you picked out as an animal liberationist.’ Jack was pretending to look shocked. He checked the wristband above his free hand. He never seemed to take that damned thing off – not even in bed, though that did sometimes have imaginative compensations. Ianto suspected that Jack had only agreed with today’s suggestion for a date at the zoo because Toshiko had mentioned some earlier Rift activity. And that ill-disguised glance was at least the tenth time Jack had scrutinised his wrist readout. He probably thought he was being surreptitious.
‘You’re off duty, Captain Harkness.’ Ianto tugged Jack’s hand, as though he could drag him away from work. ‘Hey, what’s the collective noun for…’ He looked around for a nearby display area. ‘Yeah… meerkats?’
‘Is this a date or a pop quiz?’
‘I’ll take that to mean that you don’t know,’ persisted Ianto, pulling Jack into the walkway and the conversation at the same time.
‘Or don’t care.’
‘Anyway, the answer is “a mob”. How about… lions?’
‘Easy! A pride. Like lions and cheetahs and all those pack animals.’
‘Pack animals carry things,’ Ianto objected. ‘Y’know, beasts of burden.’
‘Or they live in packs,’ noted Jack. ‘Y’know, like the word suggests.’ He grinned at Ianto, and swung his hand forward. ‘No, no, it’s my turn. How about… Weevils?’
Ianto considered this briefly, before concluding: ‘It’s a shitload, obviously.’
They both laughed vigorously at this. An old couple were walking past them on the tarmac path. The pair had their collars turned up against the cold, hands shoved well into the pockets of their matching beige anoraks. The little old guy narrowed his eyes at Ianto. ‘Language, please!’ he said mildly. ‘There are children about.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Ianto, trying not to laugh more. Jack wasn’t helping by stroking the hairs on the back on Ianto’s hand with his fingers.
The beige anorak studied them. ‘You’re a bit old to be holding hands.’
Jack smiled pleasantly. ‘You have no idea.’
The elderly woman took her hand from her coat and tugged at her husband’s sleeve. ‘You’re never too old to hold hands, Walter,’ she chided him gently. ‘You just carry on, boys.’
Walter’s face relaxed into a smile, and he and his wife walked on down the path, their translucent fingers now intertwined in an affectionate knot.
‘It’s not a pack of leopards,’ began Ianto.
Jack groaned. ‘Are we still on that?’
‘Or tigers…’
‘Hey, we’re near the tigers. Let’s ask.’ Jack had spotted a big guy in a grey boiler suit. Had to be one of the zoo staff. ‘Hello!’ Jack called to him. ‘Do you know what you call a whole loada tigers? Like a crowd, or a pride, or…?’
The boiler suit barely registered them. He was a huge, tall guy. Maybe two metres from his solid mud-caked combat boots to the tip of his spiky red hair. A ginger wardrobe of a man, whose huge hands dwarfed the PDA he was manipulating.
‘D’you mind?’ Jack was insisting.
Ianto had walked over to join him. ‘Not one of the zoo staff,’ he said. He’d spotted that the crossed-keys logo on the man’s grey uniform read ‘Achenbrite’. The zoo uniforms, now he came to think of it, were blue-and-yellow.
The huge ginger guy snapped his PDA shut with a twitch of his sausage fingers. He hared away off the tarmac path, giant strides eating up the expanse of grass between the animal displays. A flock of flamingos startled and strutted away across their pen in a pink cloud of anxiety.
‘Achenbrite?’ mused Jack.
‘I noticed,’ agreed Ianto. ‘Did you spot the earpiece?’
A shrill scream cut across the still air. It came from the opposite direction, and it wasn’t the exhilarated squeal of a kid spotting a giraffe. This was full-throated terror. Ianto considered the directional signs, orienting himself with location information before running. There was the scream again. The signs indicated it came from over by the big cats.
Jack chased after him up the incline towards the Bengal compound. ‘Did you see that sign?’ he grumbled. ‘They spelled “tiger” wrong.’
Ianto tutted. ‘It’s supposed to be tiegr. God, how long have you been in Cardiff, Jack?’
‘Long enough.’
‘Long enough to have learned a bit of Welsh, that’s for sure,’ puffed Ianto.
Jack pouted. ‘I promise to be fluent by the time you introduce me to your family.’
‘Then you have plenty of time to learn,’ muttered Ianto. They skidded to a halt in front of the tiger enclosure. Two blue-uniformed zoo staff were directing a nosy crowd of visitors reluctantly away from the area. The squat burly man with a moustache made of broom bristles was having more success than his lanky counterpart. Jack and Ianto got past him during this distraction.
Ianto shoved at the access gate. ‘Shouldn’t this one be shut when the other is open?’
‘Gives you some idea about what’s in here,’ Jack said.
‘What’s that, then?’
‘Nothing. The animals have escaped.’ Jack was checking his wristband again, with no attempt to disguise it from Ianto.
Another young guy was in there ahead of them. He had his hair tied back in a lank brown pony tail, for all the world like a zoo animal himself. He was struggling to comfort a shrieking woman, also in staff uniform. ‘It’s gonna be all right, Bethan,’ he was saying, repeatedly, like a mantra.
‘No it’s not gonna be all right, Jordy!’ she yelled at him. Snot and saliva hung down from her puce face. ‘The tiger’s already killed Malcolm.’ She gestured wildly to a bloodied heap by the tree at the centre of the compound. Pony-tailed Jordy wasn’t able to look, and concentrated instead on Bethan. She was having none of it. ‘I spotted his body when the enclosure wall disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’ Jordy’s voice was shrill with incredulity, until he remembered he was supposed to be calming her. He stepped over to the exterior wall and slapped its unyielding surface with the palm of his hand. ‘It hasn’t disappeared. See?’
‘It came back,’ she grunted, her voice low and emphatic. She stared at the wall accusingly, as though daring it to be there in defiance of everything she’d said. Ianto followed the curve of the enclosure wall with his eyes. Beyond the moat that encircled the compound was an enormous glass observation window. Through it, Ianto could see that members of the public were being hustled away from the area.
Jack nudged Ianto to get his attention. ‘The ground in here is sodden.’ He was doing that thing he enjoyed – talking through the evidence as he took it in, encouraging confirmation or contradiction from Ianto. ‘The pool in the middle there has overflowed. Backing up from the drain, maybe? Or was the victim hosing the place down before he got attacked?’
‘Unless it’s the tiger?’
‘That’s a lot of tiger pee,’ muttered Jack.
A public announcement was echoing faintly on the still air. All the loudspeakers were in the main pedestrian thoroughfares, but some of the words carried into the tiger enclosure. The zoo was closing, and visitors were requested to make their way immediately and calmly to the exit.
The big observation window allowed Ianto to see the arrival of two armed zoo staff, their tranquillising rifles unslung. Something about the window made Ianto take a closer look at the brick-and-concrete wall, or as best he could across the moat. That gap must be about five, maybe six metres wide.
‘We should leave,’ Jack said. He had covered over his wrist monitor again, and was ready to go.
Ianto studied him curiously. ‘Can’t we help?’
‘Not our job,’ snapped Jack immediately. ‘We catch aliens, not escaped zoo animals.’
Ianto wasn’t in such a rush to depart. ‘See there? To the left?’ He pointed to a line that ran parallel to the transparent wall of glass.
‘A crack in the brickwork?’ ventured Jack. He looked more closely. ‘It’s too clean to be a crack in the mortar.’
Ianto nodded. ‘You heard what that woman was blubbering about. Someone removed that wall, let the tiger out, and then replaced the wall. She didn’t imagine it. But they didn’t get the alignment perfect, and you can still see the join.’
He was about to say more when a commotion beyond the large glass wall caught his attention. Whatever it was, the armed zoo staff immediately swung around, pointing their rifles cautiously. One of them waved frantically at the other nearby staff to get them to move back and away, while he began to move cautiously forward.
‘We need to get a closer look at that wall,’ Jack said to Ianto. ‘This moat’s too wide. Need to get around the other side.’
‘No ice cream then,’ sighed Ianto.
‘What can I say?’ replied Jack. ‘I’m a cheap date.’
The pair of them ducked back through the double-gated exit from the tiger compound. Ianto kicked sand and straw and tiger shit off his boots on the second gate, and hurried around to inspect the wall beside the huge glass observation window. The last of the zoo visitors were meandering away from it, shooed off by blue-and-yellow zoo staff like so many straggling geese.
Ianto dismissed an aggressive zookeeper with merely a stern look. ‘Where d’you think those riflemen were going?’ he asked Jack.
‘Tiger hunting,’ replied Jack. ‘Better watch out, Mr “Safety First”.’
Ianto rolled his eyes. He and Jack were unarmed, because Ianto had made them leave their handguns securely locked in the SUV, and the SUV securely immobilised in parking section ‘Rhino 6’. Instead of arguing, he studied the wall. The artificially straight vertical line through the brickwork was even clearer on this side. And half-buried in the dried mud at the foot of the wall was an irregular-shaped device of unfamiliar metal. ‘Alien tech,’ grinned Ianto, and began to speculate on what he might christen it.
‘Wait,’ Jack warned him, ‘we’re being watched. They’d drawn the attention of a small group that stood at a closed fast-food concession, next to the zebra enclosure. Ianto recognised the big ginger wardrobe who’d blanked Jack earlier. The guy was talking to three other big blokes, all of them in non-standard grey boiler suits. You could make out the crossed-keys motif even from this distance. Ianto turned his head to catch what one of them was shouting.
‘… still unsecured! Never mind the damned tiger, get it. D’you hear me? Get it, collect the equipment, and get out.’
And that was the point at which the tiger ran past. It charged around the corner of the chain-link fence that surrounded the large zebra enclosure, hugging the lower rail like a racehorse entering the final few furlongs. It was an orange-brown blur, barrelling at them, running for its life. Or for theirs.
Ianto instinctively flattened himself against the wall. Jack interposed himself between the animal and Ianto. The tiger charged towards them, past them, and struck the plate-glass window of its former enclosure. The animal’s beautiful head connected with a sickening crunch, and it reeled back and slumped down almost at once.
The four men in grey boiler suits watched dispassionately. That was strange. Another odd thing was that they each carried a small suitcase.
Armed zoo staff emerged from the other side of the zebra enclosure, and raced over to the stunned, bewildered big cat.
‘The tiger’s never been up close to the glass,’ Ianto breathed. ‘So it thought it could get through. Running for home. They must have spooked it.’
‘They didn’t spook it,’ said Jack darkly. He had snapped open his wrist device again. ‘There’s more Rift activity.’
Ianto nodded. ‘It’ll be this alien tech here that-’
With a whistle of air and a whump of displaced grit, the bloodied carcass of a zebra slammed down onto the ground right beside them. Ianto jumped back to avoid getting sprayed. The animal’s head had been ripped off, and blood continued to gout from the neck, staining the black and white coat with vivid new red stripes.
‘That’s a more likely explanation,’ said Jack slowly, and pointed.
The chain-link around the field opposite quivered like a plucked string. The dead zebra had been flung right over it, fully twenty metres. And the alien monstrosity that had tossed it that distance began to howl. A hole further along in the fence revealed how it had got in. The remaining zebras were running in panicky circles on the far side of their paddock.
The monster was a nightmare creature of ragged scales. A ridge of plates ran from the tip of its thrashing tail until it bifurcated at the shoulders and ran to the crown of two independently swivelling heads. Each surveyed a different area of its surroundings, baring an impossible number of slivered teeth at the humans below.
The bruisers in the boiler suits leaped into sudden activity, snapping open locks on their cases. If they had any sense, thought Ianto, they’d be fleeing for the exits with all the other zoo visitors. Instead, they were coordinating their movements around the double-headed creature.
‘It’s a Brakkanee. Stay still,’ Jack told Ianto in a low, insistent voice. ‘It relies more on sound than sight.’
‘No wonder that tiger fled in terror.’
Jack studied his wrist device. ‘It’s a killing machine. It could handle a whole pride of tigers and not get out of breath.’
‘It’s not a pride, it’s an ambush of tigers-’
‘Not now, Ianto!’ And with this, Jack was haring off towards the zebra enclosure, staying on the grass verge to reduce noise.
Ianto chased after him. Jack didn’t look pleased when he saw that he’d followed him.
‘Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems,’ joked Ianto.
‘Yeah, right,’ hissed Jack. ‘The big monster that slaughtered that zebra made a little mistake. It’s really sweet and lovely and kind to smaller animals. What a pity that ninety-nine per cent of Brakkanee give the rest a bad name.’
The Brakkanee breached the chain-link fence, peeling it back as easily as a net curtain. One head loomed towards them, hissing.
Jack had already activated his ear-comms to call the Hub. Ianto tried to tune in and listen, until he remembered his earpiece was back in the SUV’s glove compartment. Trust Jack to have conveniently overlooked his own.
‘She’s gone shopping?’ Jack was saying incredulously. ‘All right, send Owen then, if he’s nearer.’
The Achenbrite boiler suits were removing equipment from long pockets in their baggage. Jack reached the big redhead, and asked him to move back to safety with an insistent: ‘We’re Torchwood.’
The bloke reached out one meaty hand and pushed it into Jack’s face. ‘Leave it. It’s under control,’ he said. He sounded Scottish.
Jack stumbled back from the shove. ‘If this is under control-’ he began.
One of the armed zookeepers fired her tranquilliser gun. The feathered pellet slapped into the Brakkanee’s head, and hung stupidly from its scaled cheek. The huge head shook in irritation, swooped down, and brutally smashed against the zookeeper. She plunged into the low earth moat around the zebra enclosure.
Ianto scurried quickly and quietly to help her. The woman was dazed and confused. He pulled her bodily up the embankment. Further along from where she had fallen, Ianto could see an earlier human victim of the Brakkanee. The white hair and the crumpled beige coat meant it could only be Walter. His wife knelt awkwardly beside him, sobbing, her hand still clutching his as he lay splayed out on the dry earth.
The creature had sensed movement below, and swung its two dreadful heads in small arcs as it attempted to pinpoint Ianto’s position. Jack had seen this, and threw himself forward, yelling wildly. The two heads flicked immediately in his direction.
The Brakkanee dipped one head and seized him by the left leg. Jack was snatched into the air, shaken like a chew toy, and flung aside. He tumbled down the chain-link fence and crumpled in a heap, his leg mangled beneath him. The other alien head cocked as it considered this new victim.
A grey-green mist began to envelop the Brakkanee. During the commotion, the Achenbrite men had managed to remove equipment from their suitcases and erect tripod-mounted rifles. These weapons had balloon-shaped barrels, and sprayed a fizzing cloud of energy that wrapped itself around the contours of the alien. The Brakkanee shivered, shimmered, and began to shrink. Within a minute, it was small enough for one of the Achenbrite men to cover it with his suitcase, then snap it securely shut with the alien trapped inside.
Jack lay motionless by the fence. Ianto’s instinct was to run to him, but he overcame the urge. Jack would be fine. There were other priorities.
The Achenbrite men were storing pieces of equipment back in their cases, and barking orders to each other. Ianto walked stealthily back to the tiger enclosure while they bickered: ‘You left what? Well, go and fetch it!’
The ginger guy looked surprisingly cowed for a big bloke. He was coming this way. Ianto had to get the device unburied before he got here.
The Achenbrite man saw what he was doing. ‘No!’ he yelled. ‘Stop that!’
Ianto managed to scrape the mud away from the edge of the alien tech. He prised it loose, pulled it free.
‘Put it down!’ bellowed the other man, pounding towards him. The giant guy was practically on top of Ianto now. ‘The defence system’s still active!’
The alien device scorched in Ianto’s hand. There was a fiery blast of heat and light, and everything went white, whiter, whitest. And faded away to silent black.